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Some of us having been saying trading freedom for "security" is bullshit for at least 10 years, and so find it disingenuous to lay the blame at Obama's feet a decade down the line. If that makes me an "Obama apologist" so be it, but We The People are getting exactly what we signed up for in the wake of 9/11.
Um, who else would you blame for the Obama administration ordering secret orders to Verizon to seize phone records? Bush? Cheney? Nixon?
Yes. The Obama administration is to blame for continuing the policy the Bush administration began and that was authorized (and reauthorized several times) by Congress.
Seems to me the blame gets spread around a lot on this one.
Which is of course the point. There is plenty of blame to go around, including every single one of us that sat by and let the Patriot Act become law. For the vast majority of people pointing fingers, blaming Obama is simply a convenient way to avoid a little unpleasant self-reflection.
I've got no problem with blaming both of the Twin Parties of Racist American Imperialism for the whole FISA shebang, as long as we can agree that this one's all on Barry.
There is plenty of blame to go around, including every single one of us that sat by and let the Patriot Act be passed. For the vast majority of people pointing fingers, blaming Obama is simply a convenient way to avoid a little unpleasant self-reflection.
Don't blame me, I was peddling socialist newspapers.
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I've got no problem with blaming both of the Twin Parties of Racist American Imperialism for the whole FISA shebang, as long as we can agree that this one's all on Barry.
...which we can't. I repeat, we've been on this path since 9/11, and to say "Barry did it" ignores that the public asked for this. We stuck our heads in the sand and cried "Please protect us from the scary terrorists." Blaming Obama means avoiding some long over-due soul-searching for a large chunk of the American public.
People need to understand that they don't get to authorize terrible violations of the other guy's privacy only to throw a tantrum when someone spies on them. I guarantee many of the same clowns who said "if you're not doing anything wrong, then you've got nothing to worry about" are the same people screaming bloody murder now that the government may know that they called the bisexual-midget-amputee-fireman sex line forty two times this year.
Keep saying "we".
If everybody's to blame, then nobody's to blame!
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Keep saying "we".
If everybody's to blame, then nobody's to blame!
Except no one has said that "everyone" is to blame. Only that Obama is not solely to blame, and that to stop there avoids the real issue: That the majority of Americans post 9/11 consented to being spied up as long as it meant being protected from the scary brown people -- hell, they pretty much asked for it. We as Americans are only reaping what we have sown.
That is the real scandal.
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*slips into his Boots of Commie Stomping*
Well, I didn't consent, and neither did these guys.
And Obama (or, more properly, the Obama administration) is solely to blame for this particular scandal. And while the point that the American populace is ignorant, poorly educated, xenophobic and easily manipulable by our ruling elite is certainly true, and shameful, to counterpose that "we" are all responsible for Obama (or Holder or whoever) ordering Verizon to turn over all of our phone records strikes me as sophistry.
And I don't mind if you guys are going to hurl anti-communist slurs around, but, Citizen Krensky, "filthy bolshevik goblin" is racist and I am flagging you.
Yeah, the oppression of goblins is "fictional," and we live in a post-racial world and sexism has been overcome.
Keep digging yourself deeper, bigot.
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Kill all the gobbos!
I'm flagging you, too, Comrade Meatrace.
Well, I didn't consent, and neither did these guys.
And Obama (or, more properly, the Obama administration) is solely to blame for this particular scandal. And while the point that the American populace is ignorant, poorly educated, xenophobic and easily manipulable by our ruling elite is certainly true, and shameful, to counterpose that "we" are all responsible for Obama (or Holder or whoever) ordering Verizon to turn over all of our phone records strikes me as sophistry.
And I don't mind if you guys are going to hurl anti-communist slurs around, but, Citizen Krensky, "filthy bolshevik goblin" is racist and I am flagging you.
Except this was just a renual of an existing, ongoing warrant that was started under Bush. That is why we aren't laying it all on Obama.
"Obama's not solely to blame for what his administration does, because he's just continuing policies that were put in place under Bush II" (and, incidentally, were opposed by Senator Obama)?
As if the Obama administration has no choice but to carry out the police-state measures of his predecessors.
I'm sorry, but I still think that's sophistry.
There is no scandal just feigned outrage.I sort of agree with Scott that in the end the president will be blameless. If it was truly a scandal then people would demand justice, people would go to jail,and immediate change would take place . At best this has an effect on midterm elections but i doubt even that will happen.
The difference between this president and Nixon is the Charisma check. Current president gets +20 on a save of DC22 and when hes rolls a one everyone blames GWB.
"Obama's not solely to blame for what his administration does, because he's just continuing policies that were put in place under Bush II" (and, incidentally, were opposed by Senator Obama)?
As if the Obama administration has no choice but to carry out the police-state measures of his predecessors.
I'm sorry, but I still think that's sophistry.
I think you are missing the point. We aren't saying Obama isn't to blame. We are just saying we should also be blaming the many members of congress who have repeatedly voted on the laws that are being used to make this legal. They were just as complicent, as the president and are equally to blame.
I get that, and it seems to me that it could be said about almost everything that has been brought up in this thread.
It also still strikes me as sophistry. Just because the majority of Congress made it legal doesn't mean Obama had to do it. The Espionage Act has been on the books since 1917. Doesn't mean every president since then has used it.
I might think secretly seizing everybody's phone records is analogous to what tool you use to fix your fence, but I don't.
A Tale of Two NSA Leaks: One is unsurprising, and damaging. The other is worth debating
"The leak to the Guardian about Verizon is a bit different. While it too names a company, the general understanding is that the Verizon order is just one order among many—effectively to all of the major telecommunications companies. Verizon here stands in for the telecommunications carriers, in general. So the story does not really tell terrorists which providers to avoid.
"More importantly, the story, and the leak of the FISA Court order that underlies it, do reflect something significantly new concerning a claimed authority about which the public was not previously informed. Specifically, it reveals that the government was using a particular section of FISA—known as Section 215—as a way of accessing not just specific items about specific persons on a case-by-case basis, but also as a means to create giant datasets of telephony metadata that might later be queried on a case-by-case basis. As we move into the age of Big Data, it may not be surprising that the government would want to have authority to generate such a database; we all recall the Total Information Awareness initiative, after all. But it is surprising to learn both that the government thinks it already has this authority under Section 215, and still more so that the FISA Court agrees and that members of Congress know this as well.
"Section 215 allows the government to seek and receive an order from the FISA court requiring third parties (like Verizon) to produce “tangible things” like business records, so long as the government can certify that the information sought is “relevant” to a national security investigation. It is the analog in the context of national security investigations to the grand jury subpoena in a criminal probe—the instrument by which the government can compel people to turn over material germane to the investigation. Most people assumed, prior to the Guardian story, that this provision was being used on discrete occasions to obtain individual collections of records about known counterintelligence or terrorist suspects—for records showing, say, that a certain person made certain purchases from a certain vendor or used a particular telephone to make specific calls. The government has, to some extent, encouraged this understanding, suggesting that Section 215 orders are comparatively rare and focused on specific business records.
"There have been hints for some time that the government might be using Section 215 more aggressively. Senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, both members of the intelligence committee, have been warning for a while that the public would be shocked to know how government and the FISA Court had interpreted the provision. And Todd Hinnen, then acting head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, testified in 2011 that “Section 215 has been used to obtain driver’s license records, hotel records, car rental records, apartment leasing records, credit card records, and the like. . . . Some orders have also been used to support important and highly sensitive intelligence collection operations, on which this committee and others have been separately briefed. On average, we seek and obtain section 215 orders less than 40 times per year” (emphasis added).
"That said, until the Guardian story, it was not clear to the public that the government and the court had read the words “tangible things” and “relevant” so broadly as to permit the bulk pre-collection of records—including in particular “telephony metadata,” which includes all the non-content information pertaining to phone calls, such as the numbers involved and the physical location of the phones as indicated by the cell towers—much less that the government had been collecting such data for all calls within the United States and doing so for the past seven years, according to the leaders of the Senate intelligence committee.
"This revelation is important for two interrelated reasons. First, it is simply different and grander in scope and scale from anything we had thought the law meant. As Fourth Amendment expert Orin Kerr writes at the Volokh Conspiracy, the law:
"'says that the ‘things’ that are collected must be relevant to a national security investigation or threat assessment, but it says nothing about the scope of the things obtained. When dealing with a physical object, we naturally treat relevance on an object-by-object basis. Sets of records are different. If Verizon has a database containing records of billions of phone calls made by millions of customers, is that database a single thing, millions of things, or billions of things? Is relevance measured by each record, each customer, or the relevance of the entire database as a whole? If the entire massive database has a single record that is relevant, does that make the entire database relevant, too? The statute doesn’t directly answer that, it seems to me. But certainly it’s surprising—and troubling—if the Section [215] relevance standard is being interpreted at the database-by-database level.'
"Second, if the government is going to collect all metadata domestically—even if subject to minimization procedures and in a carefully-limited fashion—that authority should be the subject of public debate. The apparent government reading of Section 215 is not on its face implausible, and it may be that the best policy is to empower the government to do precisely what it has done here. That said, unlike the PRISM system—which implements the law that we understand Congress to have debated and passed—this reading goes beyond what the public understood their elected representatives to have done."
Living in an Era of Unprecedented Bullshit by DAVE LINDORFF
Can't bring you right to the article, comrades, because of an obscenity in the url.
But...
"Let’s begin at the top: Our president (who once boasted of having taught Constitutional law), decried, way back in 2007 when he was contemplating a run for the White House, what he correctly labeled the Bush-Cheney administration’s “false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.” Fast forward to the president today, after his all-encompassing monitoring of all the phone and internet communications of all Americans, and here’s what he’s saying now (speaking last Friday in San Jose) after the humongous pervasiveness and intrusiveness of the spying was exposed in the U.K Guardian newspaper and the Washington Post:
“'I think it’s important for everybody to understand … that there are some trade-off’s involved. You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. You know, we’re going to have to make some choices as a society.'
"Jacob, quick! The bullshiznit repellent!
"Where to start? A security-for-liberty trade-off, he says? Where’s the security? We just had a bombing in Boston that would have been spotted in a minute if the FBI were monitoring the Tsarnaev brothers‘ websites (assuming they are the guilty parties). But the FBI claims it “stopped” monitoring Tamerlan Tsarnaev after interviewing him several times, and “closed” his case, despite his having travelled to Dagestan, a former Soviet struggling with separatist Islamic rebels, and despite warnings from Russian intelligence. This is the kind of “100 percent security” we get in return for handing over 100% of our privacy on the phone and online? What incredible BS!"
Report: NSA collecting phone records of Verizon customersAre you suggesting that is repugnant (which it is), or that it is a scandal (which it isn't -- or at least it wasn't for all the years Bush did it).NEW YORK TIMES: The Obama Administration 'Has Now Lost All Credibility'
Can I call it a scandal now?
Turns out it was a scandal after all.
Thanks for the bump, Citizen Wolf.
The NSA wiretapping is old news. We only confirmed what we already knew was going on under Bush. IMO Bush, Obama, the house, senate and we the American people are all guilty for passing the patriot act. I throw we the American people in as well because we seem “ok” with this intrusion. Take away our guns and we freak out…take away our right to privacy and we roll over. It’s crazy.
What happened in Benghazi was tragic. The stink the Republicans make about it is not and never has been about Obama. It's about potential future Pres candidate Hilary Clinton. Embassy attacks are not that uncommon. Under Bush we had about 8 or so embassy attacks worldwide with around 40 dead. I don't recall ever hearing much about it.
They are just desperate to weaken Hilary.
The NSA wiretapping is old news. We only confirmed what we already knew was going on under Bush.
People say this a lot. It seems to me that confirmation of what was suspected is not old news at all. Of course, it is kind of news old now...
The NSA wiretapping is old news. We only confirmed what we already knew was going on under Bush.People say this a lot. It seems to me that confirmation of what was suspected is not old news at all. Of course, it is kind of news old now...
People say this because it is true. Anyone who was paying attention knew this was going on (and in many cases, had spoken out against it). I'm still mystified how anyone was surprised at all by the NSA "revelations."
People say this because it is true. Anyone who was paying attention knew this was going on (and in many cases, had spoken out against it). I'm still mystified how anyone was surprised at all by the NSA "revelations."The NSA wiretapping is old news. We only confirmed what we already knew was going on under Bush.People say this a lot. It seems to me that confirmation of what was suspected is not old news at all. Of course, it is kind of news old now...
wholehearted agreement. I would go far as to say this has been going on since the 60s.
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Whatever, it was still a scandal. I was right, you were both wrong.
Vive le Galt!
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Whatever, it was still a scandal. I was right, you were both wrong.
Vive le Galt!
*sigh*
Hee hee!
Srly, though:
Lawyers said Bush couldn’t spy on Americans. He did it anyway.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the exposed illegal wiretaps of Bush II were spying on people if one party was outside of the United States. There was some stuff about that Mark Klein phoneworker dude, but I didn't think it was ever proven that Bush collected information on everybody. That was the first (of many) things that Snowden revelations proved that had only been suspected before.
But, I was homeless back in the heady days of 2007-08 and living at the airport. Maybe I missed it.
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Srly, I'm glad you are back on your feet. I wouldn't wish homelessness on anyone.
Thank you, I appreciate it, but as far as being homeless goes, it was pretty sweet. Sleep at the airport, sleep at a friend's house, back to the airport. There's worse places to be. Like, say, Syria.
Whatever, it was still a scandal. I was right, you were both wrong.
Wasn't the first time -- and it won't be the last.